Selfies with Komodos

It’s another poetry collection from Brian Moses and just when I was thinking how does he keep it going after thirty years and more, he asks the same question himself. In a poem called Words, he looks back on all the words he has spoken and written, even those he ‘picked off the page and threw away’, and wonders ‘could I suddenly find one day/ that scarily, spookily, / I have nothing more to say.’ Obviously, not yet Brian, not just yet. Perhaps it’s just the perception of another man in his seventies, that I detect something of an elegiac tone in some of his latest offerings. One poem invites us to think of the things that we haven’t seen enough of, another advises us to ‘Be aware, be wise, catch the moment.’ Another talks of ‘freezing time’, a notion which quickly generates second thoughts: ‘Or then I could find/ that I’m eternally a school-child…Or I can’t leave the supermarket, ever.’ And there’s My dog’s bucket list and Nobody told the dog, about the dog who goes about his life, unknowing that the vet has said his days are numbered. But don’t let me give the wrong impression, this old dog poet is still up to his old tricks. So there’s plenty of wordplay, fantastic and surreal speculation, a number of alternatives to what someone on a mobile phone might say if they weren’t telling us they were on a train (‘I’m ascending and descending in an ancient elevator’) and brilliant riffs on Taking Umbrage and Flip Flop Creatures (words like hurly-burly, hustle bustle and razzle dazzle). It’s a collection that’s as thoughtful, ingenious, curious, inviting and funny as ever, completed by some entertaining black and white illustrations from Ed Boxall.